When John Milton took a trip to Italy in 1638, he was enchanted by the various ancestors of the Idler Academy that he found there, private salons where the libertines and avant-garde artists of the day came to meet. By Milton’s biographer, Anna Beer

TAKE A not-so-young man and a very young woman: John Milton (best known, of course, for his epic masterpiece Paradise Lost and with a reputation for severity, puritanism and problems with women) and Barbara Strozzi (less well-known, perhaps, but a prolific composer of music for voice, and, according to some, a courtesan). This odd couple might well have met in Venice in 1639, but – the fabulous opportunity for a Renaissance re-make of Insignificance aside – what really interests me is their involvement with one of the Idler’s ancestors, the academies of seventeenth-century Italy.

I’ve written elsewhere about Milton in Italy. Suffice to say that he left England in May 1638 as a somewhat lost twenty-nine-year- old without a profession, unmarried – not even a girlfriend – and still living at home. He returned from Italy some fifteen months later, transformed.

In Italy, Milton had discovered the ‘private academies, an institution which is most highly to be praised there, not only for preserving the arts but also for cementing friendships’. The academies, unique to Italian city life, had self-consciously urbane names, such as the Apatasti (the Passion-less or the Apathetics) or the Svogliati (literally, the will-less). Vitally, for Milton, they operated, on paper at least, as republican meritocracies, valuing an ideal of manhood based on one’s abilities as a ‘conversational being’ who could use reason and intellect and thereby ‘come to know the truth and understand the good’.

Milton loved every minute of it. Just one example: on 6 September 1638 he read one of his poems (in Latin hexameters, as you do) to the Svogliati in Florence and was feted for it. Literary readings – followed by critiques and defences; impromptu translations from Greek and Latin; debates about linguistics, music, philosophy: John Milton was born for this environment.

The irony is that, on his return to England, he turned his back on Italy and all it represented. He was now John Milton, Englishman. He even married. But it was the academies that had enabled him to ‘fly the nest’ (as he put it), to confirm his political, religious, and literary values, and to gain the self-confidence to put them into practice.

The academies would be equally important to the composer Barbara Strozzi, but in very different ways. Born and bred in Venice, the man who raised her, Giulio Strozzi, was a leading member of that city’s Incogniti, one of the largest and most prestigious academies in Europe and a major political and social force in Venice and beyond. The Incogniti, made up of libertines, intellectuals, and artists, thrived on challenging conventional social and political values. Venetian palaces became academies, where libertines and poets debated with sceptical philosophers, and librettists tried out their texts for the city’s cutting-edge music phenomenon, public opera. Giulio Strozzi, poet, libertine and opera librettist, was at the heart of it all.

By the mid-1630s, Giulio knew that, musically speaking, Barbara was something rather special – he even arranged for her to have composition lessons from one of Venice’s leading composers, Francesco Cavalli. By the age of fifteen, Barbara was described as ‘la virtuosissima cantatrice of Giulio Strozzi’, his virtuoso singer. But then what for the budding performer/composer? Marriage or the convent? Both cost money (a dowry), and Giulio was never financially secure for long. In any case, this libertine anti-clerical poet had other plans for ‘his’ Barbara. Single-handedly, he created the Accademia degli Unisoni, an offshoot of the Incogniti, but unlike its parent, open to musicians. (Unisoni, meaning both harmonious and like-minded, was, of course, a musical pun.) The Unisoni has been described as ‘a sort of laboratory for musical and dramatic experimentation’, and it operated from the Strozzi household, thus providing a showcase for Barbara’s talents as musician and composer – and hostess. At each meeting of the academy, a debate took place (‘does slander inhibit or increase virtue?’ ‘does love bring happiness or unhappiness?’), complemented by appropriate musical interludes. On one occasion Barbara delighted the Unisoni by presenting the male-authored arguments in a debate as to whether tears or songs were the most potent weapon in love. If this was, as one historian has suggested, ‘a debate that might have been constructed for Barbara herself’ the question remains as to whether having a teenage girl perform men’s words about women’s erotic strategies is an event ‘for Barbara herself’ or for her male audience.

No matter: Giulio’s plan was working. Barbara Strozzi was becoming a celebrity, praised for her virtuoso performances – and slandered for her sexual behaviour. The slanders were no surprise, merely the currency of literary and musical life amongst the Venetian academies, all part of their members’ display of their libertine (and misogynist) credentials. The accusations of promiscuity should, perhaps, be dismissed along with the claim that Milton sold his buttocks for a few pence in Rome – another good reason for the writer to distance himself later from his time in Italy. Then again, a portrait of Barbara, painted at precisely this point in her life, does not exactly play down her position as both a sexual object and musician. The portrait, by Bernardo Strozzi (no relation), an artist who painted Monteverdi and other members of the Italian academies, shows Barbara, as one critic puts it euphemistically, as ‘impressively décolleté’. In fact, one of her breasts is fully exposed. Strozzi holds a viola da gamba (an early cello), whilst on the table next to her is some duet music and a violin. It is a remarkable picture, in part because of the almost world-weary gaze that Barbara, not yet twenty, fixes upon the viewer. It marks the completion of Giulio’s plan: Barbara Strozzi is now composer and courtesan.

Both Milton and Strozzi, as writer and composer, were formed by the academies of Italy. At first sight, it looks as if John Milton could take what he wanted from them, then walk away and re-invent himself in England.

And at first sight, it looks as if Strozzi remains trapped in Venice, a commodity to be bought and sold, simply by virtue of her sex, unable to escape a world in which libertines combined a fascination with sexual acts of all kinds, with a scorching misogyny – the Unilads of their time.

Yet the more I find out about Strozzi’s journey as a composer in the years after that ‘impressively décolleté’ portrait, the more intriguing and surprising the story becomes. It’s clear, for example, that she engaged creatively with the Incogniti’s controversies, including battles involving the proto-feminist nun, Archangela Tarabotti, and the debates surrounding ‘pure voice’. Later, she would even appropriate for herself a feminine version of the male-only Incogniti’s insignia. Instead of their Ignoto Deo (unknown God), Strozzi published her compositions under the sign of Ignotae Deae (unknown goddess). Blasphemous? Maybe. Unwise? Probably. But any woman who has the wit and guts to play the Incogniti at their own game is worth watching –and worth listening to. The first few seconds should have you hooked.

ENDS

Anna Beer is a writer, lecturer and researcher who specialises in the literature and culture of sixteenth and seventeenth century England. She was Lecturer in Literature at the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education between 2003 and 2010, and remains a Fellow of Kellogg College. She has published two literary biographies, Bess: The Life of Lady Raleigh, Wife to Walter Raleigh and, in celebration of the subject’s quatercentenary Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer and Patriot. Peter Ackroyd describes the latter as, among other things, “a persuasive reading of the power and complexity Paradise Lost.” Philip Pullman called it “a beautifully clear account of a richly complex life… Fascinatingly vivid… It’s the best narrative I’ve read of the life of our greatest public poet”.

Anna is currently writing a celebration of the achievements, against some pretty tough odds, of eight female composers over four centuries of European history, motivated by the belief that their music deserves to be part of our cultural heritage. The book will be published by Oneworld Publications in 2016. To find out more see www.shadowofthecourtesan.wordpress.com.